Re: Info on MAE-EAST

From: Howard C. Berkowitz

Date: Thu Jan 16 10:17:46 1997

At 8:25 AM -0500 1/16/97, Dorian R. Kim wrote:
>On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, Brett L. Hawn wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, Michael Dillon wrote:
>> shot, and someone spank me if I'm way off but... From what I've seen, in any
>> given city (assume a reasonable size of 200,000+) 50% or more of the traffic
>> is local. By providing reasonable rates for private interconnects at a local
>
>Nope. In a given reasonably sized (.i.e a city or so) geographical area,
>you'd be lucky to get better than 20% locality of your traffic. There are
>some exceptions where there are major traffic sources in the area, but those
>tend to be pretty concentrated.
>
>The percentage decreases further when you take into account traffic to/from
>NSPs' customers in the locality as the NSPs are not likely to private peer
>with local providers.
>
>This is in no way a case against local peering, (every bit less traffic dumped
>into the core from every locality adds up) but one needs to be aware of what
>is gained from "exchange in every town" scenario.
>
>-dorian
Interesting. I wonder if this will continue to be a long term trend.
I can't claim to have recent numbers that suggest otherwise, but, some
historical information might at least be interesting. In the early 80s, I
did a good deal of X.25 capacity planning. At what was then GTE Telenet,
we found that up to 50% of our traffic stayed local in large cities. The
larger the city, the more that seemed to stay local...this was especially
obvious in New York, where a great deal of financial data flowed.
Now, these old statistics reflect mainframe-centric traffic, and more
private-to-private than arbitrary public access. The latter is much more
characteristic of Internet traffic.
SNA and X.25 tended to emphasize the ability to fine tune access to a
limited number of well-known resources, with relatively well-understood
traffic patterns. The Internet, however, has emphasized arbitrary and
flexible connectivity, possibly to the detriment of performance tuning and
reliability.
While I recognize that putting mission critical applications into the
general Internet (as opposed to VPNs), in many cases, is a clear indication
that someone needs prompt psychiatric help, I wonder whether the increasing
commercialization of Internet information resources might tend to have
greater volumes of traffic that stays within the service area of an
exchange point.
Web cacheing would seem to encourage traffic to stay local.
Howard Berkowitz
PSC International
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